The invention relates to a method of enhancing ice-breaking operations.
Although ice-breakers are employed to keep frozen regions of the sea open for navigation, there have been hardly any improvements in the design of such vessels for decades. Conventional ice-breakers suffer from the disadvantage of a high power consumption, a low working speed, the possibility of damage by the ice and relatively poor sailing properties in the open sea.
A substantial advance was made with the introduction of a method based on the principle of shear fracture. However this recently developed form of ice-breaking only operates optimally on a restricted ice thickness range and in limited speed ranges so that if the speed of operation and the range of application are to be further increased, this system of ice-breaking may only be used with supplementary ice-breaking aids. Mechanical ice-breaking aids have also been proposed, with which the ice is scored and pre-cracked.